Beyond Brexit - a Jersey view

Mark Hucker joined VG (Formerly: Volaw Group) as its new Managing Director in January 2017. He reflects on his new position within Jersey’s fiduciary services industry, and the changes within the sector.

I left my last role in the fiduciary sector in 2011, glad to get out of an industry where clients, confidence and customer choice seemed to be in slow decline. And to some extent my pessimism has been borne out in Government statistics – any real “growth” in the headline figures for the sector over the past few years has been driven by increased expenditure on Compliance personnel – yes, one in 20 of us in the finance sector in Jersey now has a Compliance title and yes, staff costs are included in the calculation of Gross Value Added (GVA) produced by the Office of Statistics!

So why climb back aboard the sinking ship in 2017, especially in the wake of Brexit and Trump? Well of course it’s a combination of factors at a sector and a business level.